Tom Sachs

Tom Sachs discovered Knolling from Frank Gehry

Tom Sachs was born in New York on 26 July 1966. He grew up in Westport, Connecticut in a reformed Jewish home, attended high school at Greens Farm Academy and Benetton College in Vermont, where he earned his Bachelor of Arts degree, and subsequently went on to study architecture at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London. After completing his studies, Tom Sachs returned to the USA and worked for two years in Frank Gehry’s (b. 1929) furniture workshop. During this time, he began to use the now famous and closely associated term ‘Knolling’ for the first time. The term was invented in 1987 by Andrew Kromelow, the caretaker at Frank Gehry's furniture factory, which at that time was producing furniture for the Knoll company that was characterised by its right-angled design. The resourceful caretaker used the term Knolling for his right-angled arrangement of all tools on the surfaces, which Tom Sachs adopted for his artistic work and elevated to a mantra: Always be Knolling (ABK). 

Provocations with Hello Kitty, Bart Simpson and McDonald’s

In the early 1990s, Tom Sachs moved to New York where he founded his own studio Allied Cultural Prosthetics in the city centre, alluding to the previous tenant Allied Machine Exchange, which the artist understood to mean that contemporary art was nothing more than a prosthesis for real art. After a few years working odd jobs, he was commissioned in 1994 to create a Christmas decoration for Barney New York. For this, he replaced the Virgin Mary with a Hello Kitty figure wearing an open Chanel bra, the Three Wise Men with Bart Simpson, and the Star of Bethlehem with the McDonald's logo. The installation, titled Hello Kitty Nativity, disturbed and delighted equally and brought the artist his first surge of fame. In 1995, he opened his first solo exhibition at the Morris-Healy Gallery in New York, the dominant themes of which were fashion and violence, and featured weapons sculptures made from Tiffany and Hermès packaging.

Art never comes to an end for Tom Sachs

Tom Sachs has developed comprehensive and clearly structured conceptual principles for his artworks, whereby he places particular value on complete transparency with regard to his working methods: All steps are open and can be traced by the audience at any time. Seams, screws, soldering and grinding points, connections and material cores are not made unrecognisable and concealed, but are deliberately made part of the artwork. On a meta-level, this means that no work by Tom Sachs is ever really completed but remains in a perpetual process of creation. There is always room for improvement, further development and redesign.

Tom Sachs lives and works in New York.